ebeshero
commented
4 years ago @Bryant-LettucePrime We can certainly add others to that hypothes.is group, and the content of your annotations could well be useful in the project. I can also help by outputting your annotations in a nice text format that you could work with, if you like, in your encoding! I can do that over the weekend and post the output here on DHClass-Hub if it's okay with you (though I might need a nudge if you don't see it by Monday...)
bryant-bolyen
amberpeddicord
frabbitry
I'm cheating a bit. I had three(+) project ideas and this discussion has seemed pretty dead so far.
In 1813, Lord Byron published The Giaour: Fragment of a Turkish Tale. In 1815, after seven revisions and over 1300 lines, he finished it - or rather - discarded it. This mammoth piece has a fairly storied history of being roasted by English Literature critics; Writes E.H. Coleridge: "It is a hard matter to piece together the 'fragments' that make up the rest of this poem." From William A Marshall: "[The additions are] of little regard to the poem's plot or coherence" In Byron's own words, writing Giaour was "laborious."
After last semester's 19th century Brit Lit assignment, I see where they're coming from.
Any modern edition of the poem pulls pieces from a variety of editions and typically provides an outline for reference. Footnotes are also readily available for clarity/discrepancies between iterations.
Much like its edition history, the poem itself is an epic tragedy.
Taking place in the aftermath of a disastrous proxy war between the Russian and the Ottoman Empires, our tortured protagonist, a Christian in Muslim occupied Greece, avenges the death of his lover by killing her murderer... her husband, a man instrumental to bringing safety and order back to the region.
The story is told from four different perspectives and illustrates a country in turmoil: at war with its glorious past after being conquered by the Turks, at war with its religion after being integrated into the Islamic world, at war with its church after being betrayed by its Eastern Orthodox allies in Russia, and at war with its very definition of peace after righteous violence sows nothing but destruction for everyone involved.
By keeping track of how Byron made his life miserable writing this poem, we may gain a better understanding of how characters in the Giaour are made miserable by the unfolding events.
Proposal Tag, track, or otherwise contextualize the revision history of the Giaour. Track important additions included in each revision, as well as any changes to existing pieces of the text. Attempt to find patterns and/or themes that may provide some insight into Byron's decision to update it seven times. Focus of on how viewpoints of POV characters change with each iteration (if they do).
Text The Giaour: Fragment of a Turkish Tale from Project Gutenberg An outline of the Giaour in all it's horrifying glory may be found after the Intro, in the Bibliographic note.
Additional Info I wrote a paper on this last semester and used Hypothesis.is to track working notes, further readings, and notes on revisions for the assignment. Unfortunately, in my lack of foresight, this entire record is hidden from public view and relegated to our, now obsolete, class-specific group.